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When you clicked on the link that brought you here, you might have thought that someone spoofed Common Sense Advisory’s newsletter and hijacked you away from our blog. No worries. You are indeed at CSA Research, the company formerly known as Common Sense Advisory. This is part of our total redevelopment of our advanced research platform, brand identity, and corporate website.

The start of the new year is synonymous with a review and update of business plans. Successful companies conduct a yearly strategic planning session. Strategic planning is a process for defining a business strategy to shape and guide your operation. It focuses on a vision of the future and what you must do to achieve it. Executives use the technique to make decisions on what the company does, where it is going, which actions are required to make progress, what level budgets and which resources a...

The market for outsourced language services and supporting technology grew 7.99% to US$46.52 billion from $43.08 between 2017 and 2018. When CSA Research analyzed 531 responses to our annual global market survey, we computed that 64% of respondents experienced an increase in revenue. However, all providers don’t share the same experience.

In January 2018, CSA Research reported on the business outlook on 2017 and early 2018 based on a survey of 85 CEOs of the language service providers in our list of top 100 providers. In August and September 2018, we surveyed respondents on their mid-year results and their predictions for the rest of the year.

From their earliest stages, LSPs face the question of whether to build or buy the software on which they run their business. Triggers can include the need for differentiation, the need to tailor work processes for different customers and job types, or the requirement to stitch together disparate systems for monitoring and reporting. The question of when to begin proprietary development is important because if they wait too long, they may miss growth opportunities. But jumping too soon can result...

Language service providers (LSPs) – in particular small and mid-sized ones – often ask, “How can we increase sales? Where do we start? How can we build the best sales team?” The smaller ones often have a negative experience as they start formalizing the sales function. Sales training programs, including our own in the past, were just steps in the process – either planning, hiring, cold calling, objection handling, or account management.

Are you wasting sales and marketing resources going after the wrong leads? Many language service providers (LSPs) aren’t sure which prospects to pursue, so they market to a broad spectrum of buyers, with little in common, and which cross company sizes, industries, geographies, and countless other attributes. The more LSPs struggle to grow in a predictable fashion, the more they talk about hiring additional salespeople, redesigning incentive plans, and going after any prospect – good or bad.